Containment: The Death of Earth

by Charlee Jacob

  Someone noticed her.

  Her I.Q. was high, high enough to qualify for the program. She read fast, too, FTL-fast.

  A DNA test showed she had full-blooded Native Amer-Indian on her mother’s side and that her father had been Jewish.

  But who was she?

  ««—»»

  “Niña! Niña!

  Diego Archila saw the baby in the branches. He’d heard her crying as he walked into the mango grove. He began to run. “Get down, you dogs!” he screamed at the mongrels snapping and clawing at the base of the tree.

  Diego’s dogs. They patrolled his orchards at night to keep away the thieves. How did that little baby get way up there?

  The dogs paused their alarm at the baby as Diego heard a loud skreeeee! He stepped in mush. The tree’s fruit had fallen off, as if it had been violently shaken. The skins were split open and orange pulp spattered the earth. The cloying, gagging sweetness had attracted an enormous flock of black birds as big as geese.

  They attacked his dogs. When Diego looked up he saw a more flying from the west and northwest. The dogs stopped barking and wailed.

  He’d watched the early morning news. A huge cloud of ash blew toward the east, including the Texas Rio Grande Valley where he owned many groves of fine fruit. But Diego now only cared about the infant; any second, it would be set upon by the birds.

  The mango on his boots made it hard to climb but Diego went up the tree, punching with his fists black birds that dove at him. The dogs stopped their heartbreaking whimpering, and he knew they were dead. He grieved, having raised each from a pup.

  Diego remembered some old movie about birds going crazy, but he knew that just a few years ago large black birds had attacked people in cities like Houston. They weren’t afraid of humans. No, not one bit.

  “Oh, Niña!” He reached for her, gently lifting her from splayed branches. The birds came at them like angry hornets—how would he get her back down safely? He already bled from dozens of places where he’d been pecked.

  He held her close to his chest, his head bowed to further protect her, his legs wrapped tightly around the branches. Did no one see them? Hear them? His sons or any of the other workers? If we die, we die together, he thought as the birds swooped in great black streaks, trying to force them from the tree. Their feathers were greasy, stinking of brimstone and a mighty feast of carrion.

  Diego covered the baby inside his jacket, zipping her up tight. She was no bigger than his poor dogs when their litter was new.

  He began to pray. “Padre nuestro que estas en los cielos, santificado sea te nombre, venga tu rieno. Ha’gase tu volunta’d, como en el cielo, ad tambien en la tierra. El pan nuestra de cada dia, da’nosio hoy.Y perdo’nanos a nuestros deudores. Y no nos metas en tentacio’n, mas libranos del mal, porque tuyo es el rieno, y el poder, y la Gloria, por todos los siglos. Ame’n.”

  The black birds began to swirl, round and round, in a funnel going straight up.

  He saw a man, walking away from them, taller than the tallest player on the San Antonio Spurs basketball team.

  The man spoke without turning. “They are on their way. You will be safe.” What language did he speak? English, Spanish, Nahuatl? All of these were known fluently to Diego.

  “Is this your child?” Diego asked him.

  “In a way. She was laid at my feet,” the stranger replied. “I am normally ambivalent. Freedom may become a matter of some urgency. And all the rest…a predicament of perspective.”

  “Dad, where are you?” It was Diego’s eldest son, Apolonio.

  The man disappeared.

  “Here!” Diego answered, unzipping the jacket as the infant cried for more air. “Up here!”

  His other sons (except for the youngest), Bonifacio and Hipolito, were with Apolonio. They carried shotguns. Their eyes went wide.

  “What the hell happened here?” Bonifacio wondered aloud.

  Apolonio asked, “Dad, is…is that Ezequiel in that tree with you? We just saw him with Mom.”

  “It isn’t Ezequiel,” Diego assured him. “It is a baby girl. Apolonio, hurry, you and Hipolito fetch a ladder. Bonifacio, run home and tell your mother there will be a second mouth wanting milk for breakfast.”

  ««—»»

  Laura’s first college major had been geology. She’d chosen it because of a recurring dream. No matter her age, in the dream, she was always an infant.

  The Dream.

  A shadow carried her up into boiling black clouds. Then they fell together into the deepest part of the ocean. A canyon ran along where darkness, totally impenetrable, was like a one-note mantra squeezed into silent hopelessness. This was as a monk intoning Ohm, until soldiers strangled him after the thousands of years of avowed immortal effort.

  At five miles deep, the shadow enveloping her with protection, her eyes shining globes of revelation of what perhaps no people had ever seen, the canyon suddenly dropped. Seven miles now—the lowest point on the planet, and what geologists called the Mariana Trench.

  Without warning they passed through the Earth’s crust. Here solidity ended, neither rock nor layers nor core of heat. The world within held only an indigo night of sparkling stars, and more shadows.

  Shadows who took on forms of luminous, smiling beauty, who held her, cuddled and sang to her, blessed her with kisses both golden of fate and red of life. They handed her back to the first shadow who whispered, “Always remember, you will be the last of two tribes.” Then he flew with her through this wormhole of a universe. As he gently placed her in a tree, a shockwave traveled the latitudes, faster than the earth turned.

  Laura switched majors several times. Geology first, then Native American History and Cultural Studies, then Hebrew history and religion, and her eventual conversion to Judaism. She finally settled on the psychology of genocide. She’d told Adam, “I don’t know why I keep doing this. I’m leaving school, honey.”

  Her husband kissed her. “It’s okay. I only want you happy and here with me.”

  “I’m going to write a book,” she pronounced. “About what it was like growing up in that awful camp.”

  He smiled broadly. “What a great idea. It may be cathartic for you—and it’s time people understood.”

  “I’m calling it From Behind the Wall,” she said. “For what folks call us behind our backs or in snooty whispers.”

  Now, Laura wrote and her old cat Mariana purred next to her. She nuzzled the animal, my paw-and-pinky-swear B.F.F… A boom sounded, as of thunder in a coming storm. It startled her so badly she knocked over the writing table as Mariana went running, and Laura had to crawl from her bed to retrieve it, as well as her notebook.

  For several minutes, everything shook.

  ««—»»

  “Why can’t we keep her?”

  Ariela Archila clutched both little Laura and her own year-old Ezequiel close. She glared as if she’d kill anyone who tried to take the girl from her. “She and our youngest son are like brother and sister. All you will do is stick her in that refugee camp where nobody will love her as we do.”

  The woman from the U.S. government pushed her glasses back up her nose for the twenty-second time. She glanced at the cold cup of coffee, wondering if Mrs. Archila had spit into it before serving it to her. “Not a soul has reported her missing. But she must have a family somewhere.”

  Diego tried to reason. “We are her family. We contacted you as soon as we found her a whole year ago. We have even tried to adopt her legally. But your agency never returned our calls, never answered our e-mails. Now—after we love her and she loves us—now you show up unannounced, saying ‘Hand her over!’”

  Ariela sobbed. “She is my only daughter, the only sister to her brothers.”

  Miss Sweeney sighed, looking as exasperated as the Archilas felt. “We can’t let you adopt her. As I have already explained…”

  Diego waved a dismissive hand. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Some family member, all probably dead, might claw their way out of their grave i
n California to claim her. What is she supposed to do until then? Grow up neglected and alone in some camp? Here she is our family.”

  The three older sons, Apolonio, Bonifacio, and Hipolito, sat in chairs around the room, fists between their knees, wanting to beat up this useless woman.

  “Lady, she isn’t going to be claimed,” Apolonio argued. “Dad found her in a damn tree, blown all the way from Cucamonga or wherever, all kinds of strange stories about Pacifica people getting washed up or blown, alive, thousands of miles away. A little further she might have landed in the Gulf of Mexico.”

  Laura and Ezequiel crossed Ariela’s lap as she sat on the sofa. The two babies giggled and pulled each other’s hair.

  “Or maybe her real mother didn’t want her and put her in our tree,” put in Hipolito.

  “Makes more sense than some Dorothy and Toto crap,” added Bonifacio.

  Twenty-third time with the glasses. Miss Sweeney sweated a lot.

  “It’s out of my hands,” she said. She’d brought a marshal to take the child into custody. Custody, as if the baby broke some law. Even she felt ashamed.

  Ariela had been fighting back tears, but when the babies sensed the tension and voices were raised, mother and children wept together.

  Diego fumed. “You people just like walls. Keeping folks out or keeping folks in, doesn’t matter. Just as long as you can build walls.”

  ‘Laura Archila’ was the name entered into her file. The camp happened to be only a couple miles from the Archila Family Orchards. It became the official decision that—since the infant had been discovered less than 12 hours after the Pacifica tragedy—she had probably been abandoned by a local mother. The Archilas went to the media to plead their case.

  …like Fighting City Hall, or Pink Floyd’s Wall…

  The Archilas kept trying to adopt her until the state of Texas decided it was necessary to enlarge the camp, declared Eminent Domain, and seized the Archilas’ land as part of the expansion program. The Texas camp was the largest in the nation. In time, Laura’s file just read: Pacifican.

  It was the only time in her life she’d been part of a loving family—and Laura remembered none of it. But she did remember that the wall, formerly used along the border between Texas and Mexico to keep illegal immigrants out, was incorporated into the camp’s southern boundary.

  ««—»»

  Southeast of Atlanta, had a train carrying munitions just derailed? Had a bomb gone off? Semis collided?

  No, no, NO! Laura couldn’t bring herself to think earthquake. She’d rather believe Sherman’s Union Army had come from a parallel universe and was burning Georgia. Or dinosaurs had emerged in Space-Time quantum leap.

  Laura laughed nervously, telling her cat, “Hey, Mariana, tell that T. Rex to stop pooping on our roof.”

  She returned to her writing, looking over her last entry.

  I remember the camp’s barricades, tents, substandard trailers. Numbers and names sewn into our clothes.

  Once, my husband—for my birthday—gave me a gold bracelet with ‘LAURA’ engraved on it. It was lovely. But to me, it was an identification bracelet. He couldn’t understand why I hated it.

  It was odd how people became used to the camp. We weren’t prisoners, not exactly, but there were no jobs on the outside since the weather tanked the world economy. They could go home—some tried—but what was left there? Ruins, rats, Neo-Aztecs, and the Klueless Klutz Klammer-shock-freakdoms ruled by cannibal rock groups and go-go dancers of the Apocalypse.

  Creation expands out from the fulminating nativity at the center, making it a kind of circle in what some physicists insist is a flat universe. The stars with solar systems are sigils of invocation, the galaxies and names of God or angels. Planet Earth is only the Alpha or the Omega—but not both—in a single Greek letter in the great supplication.

  Aieth Gadol Leolam Adonai!

  The Lord will be great to eternity.

  Ah, but Laura, Time has been suspended and Space relocated, cum ira. You see, Demon est Deus inversus. The Devil is God turned upside-down.

  Laura pulled her pen away. Creation expands…? What? …God turned upside-down? This part wasn’t anything she’d written. It wasn’t even her handwriting.

  She glanced at her cat. Mariana sat shivering under the chair at Laura’s dressing table, yellow eyes wide with fear. More fearful than after the boom sounded and the house shook.

  She marked out these lines, scratching through them with the pen until they were obliterated. She proceeded with her story.

  Until I was six I thought almost everybody had been born without some part or other. They might have one arm or no legs, be bereft of an eye or half a jaw. They might be covered with scars or sores or cough all the time, spitting out blood. Surely each person on earth was bony, always hungry. Food grew with black dust in it. Water was brown and smelled of latrines. Babies were born bruised blue. I forever came down with parasites or fungal infections. I don’t know how I reached adulthood with clear skin.

  My only friend was a kitten I rescued when I was thirteen.

  There had been men around a campfire, drinking a brew they’d made from cactus. Someone had found a kitten smaller than my fist. They tied it to a branch and kept lowering the poor thing toward the flames. Usually I kept pretty much to myself. But no way. Something of moral outrage and perhaps budding maternal feelings (I had just begun puberty) rose in me. A soft shadow surrounded me as I pushed my way through the crowd. I stalked up like I was ten feet tall and screamed, “Give me that baby!”

  They burped, belched, farted, laughed their asses off.

  “Hey, sweetness, how old are you?”

  “I smell sumpin’.”

  “Yep, old enough to bleed, old enough to breed.”

  “What’ll ya give us for this here cat?”

  “I’ll give ya the cat and sumpin’ a lot bigger if’n you’ll sit in my lap.”

  Somebody grabbed my skirt and it tore. There was a loud blast, and this guy was suddenly missing his head. My ears rang from the sound.

  “Give her the kitten, putos,” said a calm, stern voice.

  Another man by the fire reached for something bulging beneath his jacket. There was a second blast. Brains spattered into the blaze, sizzling and popping like deep fried menudo.

  “Tres?” the shooter said, suggesting with three fingers.

  The yowling cat was hurriedly handed over. I untied the frantic kitten and held it to my pounding heart. I noticed they had ripped my blouse too.

  “Me entristece verla tan afligida. La gatita es seguro, mi hija.”

  He was one of the camp’s guards. He had worked there as long as I could remember. Two more guards approached him.

  “Diego, man! What have you done?” asked one as the other took away his shotgun. He didn’t resist.

  “They attacked my little girl,” he explained.

  “He’s a murderer!” shouted the drunken survivors at the campfire. “Didn’t give ’em no chance!”

  The media served up the story with sprinkles and a spoon: A man who tried to adopt a possible Pacifica baby takes a job as a guard to protect her. A little over a decade later he kills to defend her.

  What a shame Texans still loved their death penalty.

  ««—»»

  Laura felt as happy as she thought she could be, loving the wonderful man she’d married. They’d honeymooned in Rome and Naples, but now he was so busy she rarely saw him, and she too ill to travel with him. Laura felt she would finally find completion if she could have brought life into the world. Her child or children, she’d promised herself, would be healthy, well-fed, smothered with love and support, the opposite of her childhood and teenaged years in displacement’s squalor. Her years there took a toll on her health, her body unable to carry a pregnancy to term. They always miscarried at the end of the second trimester: bloody, twisted darlings. A piece of her heart died with each one.

  Was this how the angels in the dream had blessed her?
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  That dream changed for the first time last night.

  It began the same. Shadow carrying her down through the deepest point on earth. Then the indigo and the stars. She came out alone, through the top of a mountain made of writhing flesh. Open mouths steamed screams bound forever upon a field of revelations. Boiled blood made a milky mortar, fusing the tangle of legs and arms unable to run for their lives or reach for protection from Heaven.

  Two creatures met nearby at the summit, linked by love and hatred. They broke apart from each other as she soared out of the mountain’s center. And she knew this wasn’t merely a continuation of the beginning commenced at Pacifica, but also the signal for the end.

  Once, right after she married Adam, a ‘psychic’ stopped Laura on the street, telling her, “Yes, you are special. No matter that you came From Behind the Wall. No matter what happens that is horrible, you must keep this in your heart. You are special.”

  Then the woman rushed off down the sidewalk, long hair dyed blowing behind her like a cloak of many colors.

  ««—»»

  Laura heard the front door open and close. She knew it to be Adam and wished she could go to him.

  “Wait a couple more days before you try to walk,” the doctor had told her over the phone that morning.

  She heard footsteps up the stairs, then Adam poked his head through the open doorway, so as not to wake her. When he saw her radiant smile, he grinned back and walked in, leaning over the writing table to give her a kiss.

  “How was your day?” she wanted to know.